surroundings? That was backfill. This section here is undisturbed. This section here, where the team started to dig, is darker where the rocks and soil were excavated. The photographer was my father. He always manages to insert himself into pictures.” There was a wealth of love and amusement in her quiet voice.
“Usually it’s his thumb; this time it was his shadow. He sent this from his phone soon after he took the picture.”
“Who do you think this is?” Thorne pointed to a shadow off to the left.
“I thought it looked like a second man standing with his back to the light. But I blew up the image in my lab several months ago, and it’s too hard to tell. It wasn’t clear enough to make out if it’s a person or a rock formation. And when I spoke to him he said he’d left everyone back at camp.”
Because a man with Alzheimer’s would remember. “Probably rocks, then,” Thorne said easily, tucking the photograph back into his pocket behind her glasses. Or the man Dr. Magee claimed struck him on the head. Thorne’s gut told him it was the latter. That complicated things. He’d rather hoped recovery would be easy. He suspected Isis Magee was like crabgrass: insidious and hard to get rid of. But if someone had indeed attacked Professor Magee, Thorne couldn’t let her go off in search of Cleopatra’s tomb alone.
Bloody, bloody hell.
“Try to sleep,” he told her, reaching up to adjust the air nozzle. “Tomorrow’s going to be a long day.” Probably long and hellish as well as hellishly long.
Isis pushed back her seat to recline more fully and gave him a small smile as she snugged the thin blanket to her chin. “I’m equal parts excited and terrified,” she murmured as her lids dipped lower and lower.
Unfortunately, Thorne thought as he watched her eyes flutter and close, I feel exactly the same way.
London
ISIS LOOKED UP AT the imposing Georgian edifice with its warm brick façade and neat rows of blank-eyed sash windows. The building looked rigid, precise, and boringly symmetrical. If this was a hotel, there wasn’t even a discreet brass nameplate outside the glossy black front door.
The sun was shining, but the chill in the air caused her to snug the collar of her red Windbreaker up around her ears and stuff her hands deep in the jacket’s pockets. She’d thrown together her clothes for the trip based on digging through dusty antiquities in the museum and, hopefully, for a trip to Egypt, where the temperatures in June hit the high nineties. Not for fancy hotels or London’s chilly version of summer weather.
Jeans, T-shirts, underwear, socks. Two pairs of shoes. Her camera bag, which doubled as a purse. Although she was rarely without her Canon, she’d left it locked in the hotel safe for this “quick” trip. Too bad; she’d like to take some angled shots of the building, which looked like a buttoned-up virgin on her wedding night. The thought made her smile.
She didn’t care much about what she wore, but her silent companion was dressed in another beautifully cut business suit, which he’d changed into at the hotel, where they’d stopped long enough to drop off their luggage and wash up.
His clothes shouted armor. His crisp blue and white pinstriped shirt was open at the throat; his short dark hair ruffled in the breeze like the pelt of a seal. He looked deceptively at ease. But her artist eye saw the slight tension in his shoulders, and the grim line of his mouth.
Connor “Just Thorne” wasn’t casual or particularly approachable. In fact, he was a bit on the surly side and hoarded his words as if they were currency. Which was too bad, because Isis bet he’d be fascinating if he opened up. She spent her life getting silent things to speak, at least in her photographs. He’d be no different. She would search to find just the precise angle, and the form of lighting, that would reveal the story.
What drove the man?
What kind of accident had caused the limp? Why wouldn’t he talk about it? She wanted to pry him open like the clam he was. She wondered, as she glanced around, just what kind of crowbar would be necessary to pry inside his secrets.
He hadn’t clued her in to whom they were seeing or why, other than a brief mention that his father had something to do with the museum they needed to visit.